Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, December 18th, 2006

You Witness News: DIY Photo Journalism is Easy

I found news of this new photojournalism channel very exciting. The basic pitch is that with everyone having digital cameras and now video recorders stuffed into their everyday consumer devices, why not pay them for their coverage of events they are at. Instead of having a journalist canvassing (paid) every square inch of every city for the latest “shot”, why not pay everyday Joe and Janes for the pictures they capture (and for cheaper)?

The problem I think they’re trying to solve is twofold: 1) news is global, yet local and it’s hard to scale the current, traditional model and 2) with digital dissemination, rights to digital content gets more difficult and with many royalty structures expensive…

So the answer seems to be You Witness News from Yahoo! News. Whether it works or not as a business model is certainly TBD, but wouldn’t it be cool if the picture you snapped of the elephant that broke out of the zoo and ran down Main St. landed on a Yahoo! or Reuters article covered around the globe? And you’d get paid for it….? I think this is a very innovative idea. I’m sure there are many photojournalists who would disagree. I think the hardest challenge Yahoo! will have is educating people this exists. I’ve seen them posting it in various photo sites, but even then it’s hard to hit the masses.